


hold your breath; dim the lights (i won't say you're safe this time)

by levbian (chemicalpixie)



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Demon Hunters, Demonic Possession, F/F, F/M, Guns, Like So Many Guns, Underage Drinking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-10
Updated: 2018-12-10
Packaged: 2019-09-15 10:02:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,541
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16931196
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chemicalpixie/pseuds/levbian
Summary: ““should we just summon him together?” glimmer suggests brightly. “four heads are better than one. and all of us are experienced demon hunters, after all.””or; clove and cato stumble upon another pair of demon hunters in a cabin in the middle of nowhere, and decide to preform the summoning as a group. what could go wrong?





	hold your breath; dim the lights (i won't say you're safe this time)

**Author's Note:**

> anyway! this au has a lot more details than went into this au, but i just wanted to do something a bit lighter after the eno fic. not that this is lighter content-wise, per se, but like, length wise. also don't hate me for the ending ;)
> 
> the title comes from “hushh” by aviva, and that and “play with fire” by sam tinnesz were pretty much my soundtrack while writing this. please kudos and comment if you liked, it means a lot to me! <3

cato parks the truck, and clove hops out, grabbing her backpack full of hunting supplies. holy water, salt, the usual. “last one to the cabin’s on cleanup,” she calls, and starts to sprint to the cabin. she tags it just a few seconds before cato does, and looks up at him with a smirk on her face. “cleanup for you,” she teases.

cato leans down and kisses her on the lips. “that wasn’t fair,” he says. 

clove kisses him back for a moment, then ducks out from under his arm and into the cabin, calling, “that’s why you love me!” as she goes.

the second she gets into the cabin, though, she knows something’s wrong. there’s footprints in the dust, and according to clove’s research, no one’s been here in the last five years. either they’re dealing with a much stronger entity than anticipated, or someone else is here. clove raises her shotgun. 

“come out, come out wherever you are!” she calls, and a leggy blonde emerges from the kitchen, wearing a johnny cash tee shirt, jeans, with her hair up in a ponytail. she's holding some kind of nasty-looking spined thing. 

“who the fuck are you?” she demands, and out of the kitchen emerges another person. this time, it’s a shorter dark-haired boy, with a look of lazy confidence on his face, wearing a green flannel, jeans, and hiking boots. he’s holding what looks like a box of salt.

“we might ask you the same thing,” clove retorts. cato’s just trundled in behind her, having just grabbed the rest of the equipment from the trunk.

“i asked first,” the blonde says, a slight smile painted across her face. 

“fine,” clove growls. “whatever. clove morrow, cato roake. demon hunters.” she’s ready for them to laugh it off, call them crazy — the usual.

“no way!” the blonde squeals. clove almost jumps out of her skin at the almost-inhuman noise she makes. “let me guess — hunting coriolanus?”

clove narrows her eyes. “how’d you know?” she asks, suspicion in her voice.

“marvel lockwell,” the boy says, pointing at himself. “glimmer rosenthal. we came here to do the same thing.” clove blinks. this girl’s a goddamn rosenthal? the rosethals are - um, were demon hunter fucking royalty, practically.

“aren’t all the rosenthals dead?” cato asks, asking the question clove couldn’t decide if she was going to.

glimmer looks barely phased, which clove thinks is impressive. if glimmer actually is a rosenthal. “nope,” she says cheerily. “titus possessed my dad when i was fifteen and then he killed and ate my siblings and mother. i was at cheer camp. came home to find my dad turning into some nasty demon thing — it’d been in him a while, after all, and i shot him.” clove has no idea what to say. the silence hangs heavy in the room. sure, most demon hunters have dark pasts, but clove’s never meet one who drags it out this quickly, and with a smile on her face. glimmer obviously notices the shift in the room, because she quickly clears her throat. “should we just summon him together?” glimmer suggests brightly. “four heads are better than one. and all of us are experienced demon hunters, after all.”

clove looks at cato. she’s got no problems with it, but that doesn’t mean cato doesn’t. he’s been hunting since he was fifteen, so he’s got a good few years on her in the hunting business. he just shrugs in response. “sure, why not?” he asks, and the four of them set to work on the summoning ritual.

after an hour and twenty minutes of trying to summon coriolanus, with no result, they finally decided to call it quits. clove stands up. she can’t believe they trekked all the way to the middle of goddamn nowhere and worked with other hunters only to have their fucking summoning not work! ”fuck!” clove yells, kicking over one of the bottles of holy water.

“let’s play truth or dare,” marvel suggests, with all the bravado of a high schooler who just made the varsity team. clove rolls her eyes, but really, she’s open to the idea. it’s not like she has anything better to do. they’re stuck in this cabin until it’s light enough to drive out of the forest without getting into a wreck, and there’s no wifi or cell signal.

“okay, okay,” glimmer says, looking bored, flipping her hair back over her shoulder. “clove, truth or dare?”

clove bites her lip for a moment, looking at the old boards of the cabin floor. “truth,” she says. she didn’t know glimmer well enough to know if her dares would be something dangerous or something stupid but harmless, and in a profession like hers, dangerous dares could get you killed — or worse, possessed.

“okay, what got you into hunting?” glimmer asks, twirling a lock of her golden hair around her fingers.

clove frowns. this wasn’t a question she was prepared to answer. “i was seventeen when my friend calla got possessed by a demon.” cato squeezes her hand. he knows talking about calla is hard for her. he doesn’t even know the full story, and they’ve been working together since she was eighteen. he doesn’t know that clove tried to exorcise calla in a local river, and she’d drowned. the demon in her had made it so that calla drowned, but that didn’t make it any less clove’s fault. “and she died because no one knew that’s what was happening, so i became a hunter. and, well...” she shrugs a little. “the rest is history.” she glances at cato, who looks visibly worried, and squeezes his hand to indicate that she’s okay. “your turn,” clove smirks. “last person you kissed?” 

“i didn’t even get to tell you whether i wanted truth or dare,” glimmer pouts, but at clove’s glare, rolls her eyes. “fine, whatever. it was a friend of mine.” she crosses her arms across her chest, and stares at clove, who gestures for her to go on. “diamond deluca. we’ve - we’d been friends since both of us could walk, grew up closer than sisters. she was there for me when my family was killed by titus.” glimmer looks down at the floor, and clove thinks she can see glimmer’s lower lip wobble a little. “she got possessed by a demon, and marvel and i were across the country, and she was found by this group of backwoods hunters, and...they burned her alive.” she laughs a little, a choked-up throaty laugh that honestly just sounds kind of pathetic to clove. “fire doesn’t kill demons, but i guess they didn’t know that. killing the possessed only kills the host.” glimmer blinks, flipping her hair over her shoulder and looking up, examining her nails. “there. happy now?”

“you know it,” clove says, and she frowns at cato. “i’m thirsty. will you grab the beer?” 

cato presses a quick kiss to clove’s forehead. “of course, babe. be right back,” he says, standing up. clove tosses him the keys and he catches them on his way out the door. 

“hope you brought enough for the class,” marvel calls at him with a cackle, and clove rolls her eyes. 

when cato gets back, he tosses the bottle opener to clove and distributes the beers. clove pops hers open and passes the bottle opener around, before taking a swig of beer, savoring the piney flavor. 

glimmer turns to marvel with a mischievous look in her eye. “mar, you’re up.” 

marvel holds his hands up, as though he’s signaling defeat. “glim, please,” he says, tone jokingly begging. 

“don’t worry,” glimmer says. “i promise it’s easy. close your eyes,” she purrs, and marvel does. 

“that’s not the dare, is it?” marvel asks, confusion underlying in his tone. 

“nope,” glimmer says, standing up and walking in front of him. clove relaxes into cato’s side. whatever this is about, it has nothing to do with them. “truth — do you trust me?” she murmurs, and marvel nods. 

“of course,” he says, and no sooner have the words left his lips than glimmer shoots him point-blank in the forehead. clove jumps, her hand automatically going to the knife she has in her boot. 

“jesus!” cato yells, pushing clove behind him, which she resents, because she’s more than capable of taking care of herself, but now is not the time to have this conversation because glimmer’s got a goddamn pistol in her hands and she just shot her hunting partner. “what the fuck was that about?”

glimmer turns around, her boots dully glinting off the fucking oil lantern cato had insisted they bring and use as lighting and if they make it out of this alive clove’s going to kick his ass because yeah it adds to the ‘ambiance’ or whatever, but it’s also flammable as hell itself and if it gets knocked over they’ll all be in deep shit. “he was possessed,” she says, her tone full of shock. “i had to do it.” her lip quivers again, and she repeats, with more conviction, “i _had_ to do it.”

clove glances at cato. she doesn’t understand what just happened, not really, but she knows they’ve got a body count and when you’re dealing with a demon the body counts don’t tend to stay in single digits. “okay,” clove says. “okay. so he was possessed,” she pauses, and turns to glimmer, who has blood splattered across her johnny cash tee shirt and on her hands. “so does that mean our summoning worked?”

“i guess,” cato says. “but how did coriolanus get through the salt circle?”

“we destroyed it, remember?” glimmer says, her lip wobbling. “after it didn’t work. he must not have appeared until after we’d broken it.”

clove frowns, looking at cato. she’s not buying this story. not when glimmer just shot her fucking hunting partner point blank. “okay, sure. and how did shooting marvel help? now we don’t know where the demon is!” her voice raises as she speaks, even if she’s trying (rather unsuccessfully) not to yell. “unless you’ve suddenly discovered a bullet that kills demons,” she adds, tone sarcastic. she knows there’s no such thing.

“if a body dies while a demon is possessing it, then it’s bound to the soul inside until it gets sent back to hell,” glimmer says. “it’s demon hunting one-oh-fucking-one,” she adds, annoyance in her tone. clove bites her lip. she’s never heard of this before, but she’s only two years into hunting, and everyone who has even slept with a demon hunter in passing knows that the rosenthals have been hunters since glimmer’s grandad’s wife was killed by a demon. 

“okay,” clove says, lowering her weapon, watching out of the corner of her eye as cato does the same. “so what are we going to do about this?” she asks, gesturing to marvel’s corpse. the blood is spilling all over the floor and congealing quickly, which is going to make it a pain in the ass to clean up later.

and then, suddenly, it all clicks. “fuck,” she mutters. she can’t believe she didn’t see it earlier. “cato,” she murmurs. “i have to talk to you.” glimmer quirks an eyebrow at her.

“trouble in paradise?” she asks, a smirk plastered across her face. 

“something like that,” clove mutters, grabbing cato’s hand and dragging him into the kitchen. it was a bit cramped, the cabin being old as fucking shit, and having been designed to be one room and renovated later, but that doesn’t matter right now. “cato,” clove says, her tone low and urgent. “glimmer’s the one possessed. she’s lying.”

cato shakes his head. “clover, how do you know? not that i don’t trust you, but i’m not looking to increase the body count without good reason.” there’s a look of concern on his face, and even though clove wants him to go kick the door down and deal with glimmer’s possessed ass she appreciates that he’s being thorough.

“didn’t you _hear_ her?” clove asks. “when she was talking about diamond. she said that the hunters burned diamond alive.”

cato cocks an eyebrow. “yeah, your point?”

“she said that it didn’t kill the demon, just the _host_ ,” clove says, hoping he’ll understand. 

“shit, clover,” cato says, realization dawning in his eyes. “fuck. you’re right. what should we do?”

clove’s mind races with possibilities. “i guess we have to kill her. get the demon out of her. give us more time to figure out how to deal with this.”

“so what’s the plan?” cato asks. this is one of the things clove loves about him. he’s all business when it comes to demons. frankly, it’s kind of hot, and if they didn’t have to deal with a real life demon possessing the cute blonde in the other room, she’d have other plans for him. 

“we go back in, and you shoot her? i’ll distract her,” clove murmurs, standing on her tiptoes to press a kiss to cato’s lips. 

“got it,” cato says, loading his rifle from where he’d left it on the kitchen counter, and he follows clove back into the main room. 

clove walks into the main room, cato right behind her, and she turns to face glimmer.

“what’s going on?” glimmer says, looking to cato with the rifle in his hands. 

“nothing personal,” cato says, and shoots glimmer in the forehead. her mouth forms a pretty little ‘o’ as she staggers backwards and collapses. but the demon doesn’t come roaring out in a puff of black smoke like it’s supposed to.

cato blinks in confusion, and turns to clove. “coriolanus didn’t...” it’s then that he realizes. clove’s smile twists into an unnaturally wide smirk. 

“ding ding ding,” she says, her voice deeper than it should be. her pupils are blacked out, and cato realizes what a grave mistake he’s made. “whatcha gonna do about it, lover boy?”

“get out of her,” cato almost growls. “when did you get in her?” he asks, his hand shaking as he points the gun at clove.

“i was in glimmer for _weeks_ ,” coriolanus says, what almost sounds like lust in his tone. “why do you think your summoning didn’t work? i was already here.” he smirks. “i was just going to kill marvel here. far enough in the woods that no one would question it or even find the body till he was just bones. i even planted the tip online that this was ‘my’ center of power, to convince him. but then you two came along, and well. i couldn't resist a little _fun_. i hopped out of that dumb blonde bitch the second i shot her little boyfriend, and into your girl. why do you think she kept telling you to shoot glimmer?” clove laughs, deep, bellowing, except. cato has to remember. this isn’t clove. this is coriolanus, inside her body.

cato blinks and pulls the gun up, pointed straight at clove. “what’re you going to do? shoot me?” the demon cackles, clove’s voice sounds twisted and distorted. “you can’t exorcise her on your own. unless you want to drown her like clove did calla.”

cato’s face falls slack. he didn’t know that’s what - fuck. the demon watches his face shift and laughs. he raises the gun again and closes his eyes.


End file.
